


maisie (what kyle was talking about at passover dinner when he said the rat incident of 2010)

by setokaibas



Category: South Park
Genre: Everything is Okay at the End?, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mild Gore, Profanity, TW: mentions of animal death, randy is awful & this is why we can't have nice things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 23:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18292727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/setokaibas/pseuds/setokaibas
Summary: “Things have changed, Stan. Can’t you see it?”The response comes without pause, an inexact mirror of that snowy day.“No. But I wish I could.”Kyle Broflovski-Marsh's slim real estate holdings this side of sanity are further eroded when marital stress and a pair of female domestic rats enter his life one weekday evening.





	maisie (what kyle was talking about at passover dinner when he said the rat incident of 2010)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heelbruiser](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heelbruiser/gifts), [julads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/julads/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Joyless Street](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17528165) by [julads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/julads/pseuds/julads). 



Kyle couldn’t believe that he and Stan had been married for six years.

He recalled the ceremony as small and sparse in decoration, much like their current makeshift home. Kyle had made every effort to scrape together the remaining money they had gotten from their few supportive relatives and Stan’s interfaith relationship support group--along with the few dollars Stan had been saving for them since he was eighteen--in order to secure something like a halfway decent down payment on a house, but nothing was coming together. His accountant’s salary and Stan’s electrician’s apprenticeship stipend were both going to pay off debts, which left them with nothing more than dreams and Goodwill furniture on the outskirts of what had to be Denver’s shittiest housing complex. Even after Kyle’s extensive efforts to cut down on costs in every spot from Hulu subscriptions to cell phone service plans, they had been living on a shoestring in their little half-duplex for what seemed like years (although it was really more like months). Stan had a particular way of stating succinctly his own feelings about their married life whenever things got particularly tough, namely “we’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do”. Although his own feelings were more mixed on the matter, Kyle was simply glad they weren’t living in college dorms eighty miles apart as they were years before, desperately sending each other drug-influenced texts of W.H. Auden poetry and Leonard Cohen lyrics that could never quite mimic the feeling of their teeth on each others’ necks.

However, even with all his customer service training and the unending well of love he had for Stan, Kyle still dreaded facing the uphill battle that was convincing Stan to get a second job. For as much as he loved his friend and husband, the man was unrelentingly stubborn, and his volunteer position at the All-County Animal Shelter was something he was unwilling to give up even for one hour a week. He had relished telling Kyle a few days before over reheated Chinese takeout that he had recently been promoted to chief dog and rodent keeper for the shelter on the weekends when the subsidized professional carers had the day off. Along with this proclamation came several videos of overly excited Golden Retrievers and pitbulls, as well as -- to Kyle’s thankfully well-disguised aversion-- a bizarrely loving and detailed photoshoot of two speckled female rats (the breed of which he didn’t care to remember). Kyle had to admit that he found Stan’s demeanor surrounding his new position more than heartwarming; seeing something other than drained but stoic realism in the eyes of the man he loved was something he’d feared would never happen after Stan had acquiesced to Gerald’s insistence that they move away from South Park and live on their own.

It seemed to him extraordinarily petty in this situation, then, that he couldn’t manage to summon nothing more than violent hatred at the thought of someone (especially himself) having rodents as a pet. In his quasi-germaphobic mind, rodents belonged outside, where they could roll around or do whatever else they evolved to do. They weren’t like the one scraggly cat Cartman had dumped on the Broflovski’s doorstep or Sparky, who even in his advanced age still greeted Kyle with a growly bark and loving slobber on the knee. Perhaps it was the memories of the few times he had gone to Kenny’s house and seen the beady-eyed things gnawing on every exposed surface (including, once, Kenny’s own arm), though, that really made Kyle’s stomach clench in half-baked nausea. Once, he’d had a nightmare of the same rats swarming at him, Kenny in pieces, little jaws snapping at his flesh until he could see his own bone. Despite this fear (which later became a repeating nightmare for him in his two days of rehab), he’d never told Stan of the rat incident, so as not to cause an upset in the animal-rights-crusading heart that had characterized the man since birth. Indeed, it almost pained him after a few weeks of seeing his husband think he had convinced Kyle of the merits of rat adoption to have to evade Stan’s suggestion that their makeshift home expand to include two of the new arrivals at the shelter. He didn’t mince words when saying no after a few days of subversive pleading from Stan, though, and informed his oddly upset partner that there was absolutely no way he would reconsider. Perhaps Stan should instead ask the dewy-eyed teenage girl he had been watching over (who, according to one of Stan’s videos, seemed to love them even more than Stan did) if she had space for them in her dorm instead. After all, Kyle did agree that the animals deserved a home, but did it really have to be with _them?_

Stan gave Kyle the mild silent treatment for a few days after that uncomfortable confrontation, but there was a certain look in his otherwise exhausted eyes one day after he returned from wiring a house that let Kyle know he was planning something. It was the same look Stan had every time he’d tackled a difficult math project in high school or evaded questions from his overly invasive grandfather about whether or not he was going to take Wendy Testaburger to prom after they’d broken up for the eighth time over Stan’s now-mostly-gone drinking issues. Stan’s plans were usually well-meaning, and he’d given Kyle an acceptably sincere-sounding reassurance over a tub of sugar-free chocolate ice cream that there would be no rats in their home no matter how desperately the aforementioned creatures needed one, but somehow the statement failed to convince Kyle completely that something wasn’t going on behind his back.

Regardless of whatever machinations Stan was cooking up, though, it was time for Kyle to break the news that Stan was going to have to reduce his time at the shelter and move back into his former job as a Home Depot handyman in order for them to make ends meet the following month. He’d already done the legwork of telephoning Stan’s former boss during his lunch break and reassuring the desperate middle-aged man that, yes, Stan would be overjoyed to take up his position as the premier paint mixer at the Goldman Street location again, provided he was restored with all of his former benefits and vacation days. Kyle reassured himself with the notion that Stan enjoyed that position well enough and, since he had whittled down Stan’s days on shift to two, his animal-loving partner wouldn’t have to sacrifice but one day of his volunteer work. Truthfully, however, he hated to ask Stan to do more at all-- but they really had no other choice. Despite the simpering he’d done at work to increase his own share of the financial load, there were only so many hours the small vegan restaurant he worked for would allow him to put in. He’d thought about seeking other employment himself, but under no circumstances would ever think about taking the job he’d been offered by one of Gerald’s associates at Budweiser or suffer expending his dwindling energy asking “would you like fries with that?”

Thoughts of Stan humming as he carefully painted sample paint cards Kyle’s favorite colors ran through Kyle’s mind as he got home and hurriedly filed through some bills he was planning to use as evidence for their dire financial need. His joints ached from carrying the four ten pound bags of ALDI groceries he’d slowly lugged from the distant parking lot, and his wrists screamed from typing the day away on yet another menial tax filing in an office that wasn’t even his. After putting all the backup he’d need for his conversation in a blue file folder and setting it on the rickety coffee table, Kyle decided he’d have a much better chance of explaining himself calmly after strategizing with a relaxing shower. Looking at the clock, he noted the time: 5:30 pm. Stan would be home in 45 minutes from his job site, and he still had to put the groceries up. Those few minutes in between tasks would have to be enough for him to take a few deep breaths.

Unfortunately, his time spent in the bath was less than optimal for clearing his head; although the warm water felt good, he found himself constantly missing Stan’s strong fingers gently scrubbing his scalp. The Massive Attack album he’d set to play in the background wasn’t helping take his mind off anything either, which was strange as well. Why couldn’t Kyle just _relax_?

It wasn’t that he was overly attached to Stan or his marriage, as he’d been accused of by even his own mother many times over; it was merely that, having glimpsed life without Stan, he found it vastly less bright and fulfilling. He was the kind of person to hold on incessantly to what he wanted once he’d found it, but sometimes that holding on ended up bruising him instead. Maybe _he_ was too fixated on creating the life he’d always imagined for himself and Stan. Perhaps _he_ was the one to blame for the situation they were in. After all, Stan hadn’t settled choosing electrical work as a career, or at least that’s what Kyle wanted to believe for both their sakes. Kyle should have gone to medical school like his father had always wanted him to. Maybe then they wouldn’t be poor and eating cardboard-flavored pasta for dinner five days in a row. Maybe then Stan wouldn’t be _hiding things from him_ and staying out late at work in the cold just to make the few extra dollars in overtime money they offered him.

Suddenly, a sharp pain cut across the side of his throat, and Kyle realized he’d been shaving on autopilot with the shower mirror. The deep track mark left by his clenched fist immediately drew blood, tinting the cloud of shaving cream there with bright red tears that matched the swollen state of his exhausted eyes. Taking this as a sign that it was time to get out, Kyle reached for his hair towel on the rack and ruffled his curls with it before pausing abruptly. In the background, he heard the turn of a key in the front door lock and then a loud crash. An alarmed baritone voice yelped out a “Fuck!”, and Kyle’s heart leapt into his throat within a nanosecond. _**Shit.** Shit, shit, shit_. His zone-out in the shower had cost him. Stan was home, and Kyle was nowhere near composed enough to face his spouse, much less present his well-reasoned plan for suggesting that Stan reduce his time doing one of the few things that made him happy. And now, the aforementioned man was having a personal crisis in the foyer. Damn it all, _his neck was still bleeding!_

Quickly, Kyle wrapped his hair up, threw his best navy robe on, and flung open the bathroom door to come to Stan’s rescue-- only for two enormous rats to scurry across his un-slippered feet, trailing flakes of shaved wood in their wake. Doing a quick bunny hop back and clapping his hand over his mouth to stifle his noise of alarmed disgust, Kyle scrambled for a few old washcloths in the linen closet before striding down the hallway to find the creatures. Unluckily, Stan seemed to be otherwise occupied with some other tasks related to the mess he’d caused; after a few minutes of kneeling and squinting behind boxes, Kyle found the two rodents curled up and squeaking nervously beside some of Stan’s tennis shoes. In the meantime they’d charmingly also pooped on some of Kyle’s loafers, which only further fueled the half-deranged yell that burst from the curly-haired man’s mouth barely a breath later.

“STANLEY GABRIEL BROFLOVSKI-MARSH! GET IN THE BEDROOM THIS FUCKING INSTANT AND CLEAN UP THIS MESS!”

Shaking a bit from the anger that had come over him, Kyle gingerly scooped up the wriggling rats with his makeshift barriers and held them as far away as practical while waiting for his husband to deliver him from their presence. Thankfully, the aforementioned Stanley Broflovski-Marsh had the good grace to look ashamed of himself when he, still in his work clothes, appeared in the bedroom with a clean hand towel only seconds later.

“You aren’t using my good towels for these… creatures,” Kyle snipped, leaning from his half-stoop against the upright post of their canopy bed to steady himself. He could feel his own towel about to fall off his head and his robe akimbo; if Ike was here to see this, he would have loudly quipped that Kyle looked like a drowned cat. He probably would have been right.

“It’s not our towel, it’s their towel from the shelter. Now give them to me, please, Kyle, you’re not holding them properly.”

Stan seemed frustrated for some reason, tired even, but Kyle discarded this observation momentarily in favor of letting Stan remove the rats from his hands and cradle them like children. This tenderness stupidly inflamed Kyle’s temper a little more, but he pursed his lips in lieu of saying something he knew would hurt Stan’s feelings. Instead, he settled for wiping his fingers on his robe before pinching his nose and giving his oddly unperturbed husband the best stink eye he could muster.

“Stanley.” The word came out like one of God’s judgments.

Stan swallowed in what Kyle spitefully hoped was nervousness, the patch labeled _Broflovski_ moving a bit faster on his uniform-clad chest. His eyes raked over Kyle, as they normally did whenever he got home, only to freeze as they got to Kyle’s neck. His expression morphed instantly to one of concern, and whatever words Kyle was going to fling at him froze.

“Kyle, are you bleeding?”

Almost absently, Kyle touched the stinging spot on his neck; his fingers came back spotted in angry crimson, tinged with the darkness of a disrupted clot.

“I cut myself shaving in the shower.”

Stan moved to put the squeaking rats down and come over to examine Kyle’s wound, but Kyle gestured an aggressive no to stop him. He could see Stan rock back on his heels from the corner of his eye and give Kyle the same strugglingly neutral look they’d both given Sharon as boys when they’d tracked mud all over her new carpets and were waiting for her to raise her voice at them. _Damn, were his angry rants really getting that bad?_

Kyle breathed in slowly to quiet the rush of emotions he felt before carefully enunciating his words, using all his anger management skills from the nauseating therapy his mother had forced him through to shove back his urge to yell. He was relieved to see Stan relax a little in his peripheral vision when he let his brow finally unfurl. Finally, after a moment, Kyle found the calm words he needed. He unclenched one fist.

“Stan. Go put those animals back in their cage right now. Then you can help me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Stan said quietly. He cast one more concerned gaze in Kyle’s direction before turning on the heel of his sock feet and taking the now-quieter rats back into the living room, where Kyle presumed Stan had set their cage in his effort to clean up. Kyle stood up from his stoop, his left knee popping painfully, then rearranged his robe and walked slowly back to the bathroom. His temper was still simmering as he toed his abandoned slippers on from beside the tub; in the back of his head, he hoped Stan would take his time coming back. He wasn’t quite ready to talk to Stan about anything, much less the complicated issue at hand; the little bit of sanity he’d managed to muster from the depths of his patience reservoir was now long gone given the two rats that had just crawled across his foot only minutes before. Regardless, though, he had to face the facts, no matter how much he wanted to relegate Stan and their whole married world to the furthest reaches of his mind at the moment.

Trying to stop ruminating on what Stan would say when he finally came into the bathroom was a Herculean task that required Kyle to keep his hands busy with something that wasn’t fiddling with his hair or chewing on his fingernails like he did at age eight. He inspected the contents of the nail care drawer to make sure Stan hadn’t thrown away the old clippers by accident, and after assuring himself two times that nothing was missing, arranged the dinosaur-themed first aid kit about fifteen times before coming up with a configuration he liked. He was considering moving their stash of EpiPens to the outer side pocket with the Ankylosaurus on it when the very edge of his gaze abruptly brought Stan to his attention.

Thankfully, his husband had removed the outer overalls and jumpsuit he wore to work; in the half-light of the hall, Kyle could only make out a rumpled crew neck t-shirt and sweatpants below the hesitant expression Stan wore. Kyle didn’t acknowledge Stan for a moment, instead choosing to look at his face. Day-old stubble was sprouting from the softened jaw Stan had acquired after a few months of not being able to afford his gym membership, but the same blue eyes as ever still looked openly at Kyle with nothing less than the familiar affection they’d held since Stan and Kyle snuck out of prom together to go late-night bowling and eat terrible fast food. The bags under those eyes had deepened since Kyle had last watched Stan sleep; often they’d twist with whatever nightmare was in vogue that evening. Once, Stan writhed beside him after a particularly difficult day and woke up with a shout of _no, I don’t want to go to the hospital, no, no!_ The reminder of that particularly traumatizing night--not even a month ago now that Kyle really thought of it-- made Kyle turn his eyes away from Stan and onto himself in the still-foggy mirror, half-ashamed of the fact he and his nagging insecurities had probably been the cause of half Stan’s stress for most of his life.

Jesus fucking **_Christ_** , he looked like hell. A drop of blood was running from his neck onto his exposed chest, and some rivulets of dried blood made a relatively simple cut look like a Hollywood-style slit in his throat. His eyes were wild and sunken, the hazel in them almost black, and his too-long hair hadn’t been trimmed in weeks. He didn’t want Stan to see him like this, not when Kyle was doing only half the work that he was and Stan still had the energy to deal with him without even yelling back one bit. The only comfort Kyle felt in that moment as he braced his hands on the countertop was knowing that he looked just as much a monster as he felt.

Said comfort was immediately disrupted by Stan’s quiet sock-footed shuffle into the bathroom behind him. Thankfully, he didn’t try to speak, only searched for the antibiotic cream and cotton balls in the first aid kit; Kyle moved aside so Stan could look in the cabinet below him for the dark bottle of hydrogen peroxide dutifully marked in his half-sloppy handwriting. Once everything Stan insisted on getting to bind his wounds had been set on the counter, Stan seemed to pause beside him, and Kyle finally turned his head to recognize his husband’s presence as something more than a shadow. Now that he wasn’t in the hall anymore, Stan’s dirty black hair glistened greasily under the top lights over the vanity, making him look even more like a ghost save the pale skin and look of death. Maybe Kyle should hate that this is the first thing he chooses to comment on, instead of something more polite like the weather.

“Stan, how long has it been since you washed your hair?”

He hoped this would distract Stan enough to divert the elephant in the room from stomping around his stomach. It fails miserably. Instead of answering, Stan purses his lips, leaning a bit on the counter with one strong hand and shifting the Tyrannosaurus wound tape to the side.

“What’s wrong, Kyle?” “

What?” Kyle says it to the counter, unable to look Stan in the face. He’s not ready, and as usual Stan has cut straight through to the heart of the matter in his sincere and razor-sharp way. The stress of everything is beginning to crash down on Kyle’s shoulders, all his mental preparation and anxiety suppression useless. He’s drowning, and the water will choke him unless Stan helps him _**right fucking now.**_

Instead, Stan carries on. “I said, _what’s wrong,_ Kyle? You never ask me shit like that unless you’re trying to distract me.”

“Just answer my question, Stan. _Please_.” It comes out a bit more shaky, more angry. Inside, Kyle’s begging Stan to stop pressuring him for answers, just shut up, just help him, help him, everything is going to go wrong if _you_ don’t help, _shut up, **shut up**_!

“This morning. Now, what’s wrong, Kyle? Please tell me.”

“It _doesn’t matter_.” Kyle snips at Stan remorselessly now, shaking again, looking at him straight in the eye with the benefit of the vanity mirror. The anger comes in fast pulses up his neck; his cheeks flush, but he doesn’t care. The right, scripted words he’d learned in pre-marital counseling aren’t coming now. All he wants to do is make Stan understand, and he’ll do it any way necessary. Why had he asked Stan to help him in the first place if all Stan was going to do was bitch at him while he did it? Why couldn’t Stan just _do what he was supposed to_? Why couldn’t he just stand there and do what _Kyle_ needed? Did he even hear _Kyle_ anymore, or was he too busy looking for something to hold over Kyle’s head to force him into being the perfect husband Stan insisted on coming home to every night?

“Bullshit, dude. You’ve been pacing around like this for days. Please tell me what’s going on. I want to know why you’re upset.” Stan crosses his arms; his brow furrows in a way that reminds Kyle of himself--or maybe Sheila-- and contrasts the plaintive tone of the last words he speaks. Before Kyle realizes it, something thin in him burst. He snaps his head fully towards his husband within a millisecond of processing Stan’s unwelcome response and raises his voice to an unholy blend of scream and sob which he’s powerless to stop. The noises coming out of his throat don’t sound like the him he wanted to be, but some feral teenage version of himself he’d thought he’d quashed after years of behavioral therapy and medications.

“Maybe I haven’t told you because I don’t want to fucking talk about it, Stan! God fucking damn it! Can’t I have anything to myself anymore? Let me live for one minuscule, tiny, microscopic millisecond in which I’m not worried about _you_ , you or those _goddamned rats_!”

Stan makes a subtle plaintive noise in his throat. The scared twelve-year-old boy comes back again in his eyes. “Kyle, I’m just--”

The Kyle alive in Stan’s husband’s body at the moment will have none of Stan’s further attempts to take control of the situation. He needs to put his foot down, make Stan feel as badly as he feels, and no amount of groveling from Stan will stop him from doing so.

“No, Stan! Listen to _me_! Act like you give a shit! Every day you come home, asking me the same endless questions about shit I’m actively trying not to think about, showing me the same inane animal videos I only laugh at for you! It’s always animals this and Sharon that, work and bills and you bitching about your dumbass supervisor! Do you ever ask me about _my_ damn feelings? No! Well, guess what, Stan! I don’t live for you! I’m not your goddamn therapist and I never have been! Why don’t you go cry into the bottom of a bottle again like you did after your dad walked out on you and just **fuck off**!”

Too late, Kyle realizes what he’s said, and everything crashes to a halt. His ears are ringing still, and maybe their next door neighbor banged on the wall to tell them to be quiet, but all he can understand now is the small light dying a slow death in Stan’s eyes. The deep exhaustion replacing it was the exact same expression ten-year-old Stan had at school when his father had come home drunk and yelled at him and Sharon the whole night-- the same expression seventeen-year-old Stan had at their last sleepover when he told Kyle he wanted to die the day Eric Cartman outed him as gay during the middle of Mass while he was away at a hockey competition. Kyle wants to vomit, or better, disappear.

“Are you done?”

Stan’s furious but resigned question jerks Kyle into a new panicked haze. He looks at Stan in the mirror over heavy breaths, hoping, hoping against hope Stan will just pick up another cotton ball and ignore everything bleeding in him but the wound on his neck. With his eyes, he begs Stan to just forget that last sentence, forgive Kyle like he always did.

Instead, Stan’s mouth slowly sets once again into the firm pale-pink line of resigned adult responsibility Kyle remembers all too well; he straightens from his concerned posture to brace himself for a moment against the emotions he feels. First pain, then remembrance, then fury roll through Stan’s steeled gaze, and one by one they mingle there until Stan looks just as frightening as Kyle imagined he had only moments before. The next sentences from that strong mouth are carefully selected, the words enunciated carefully. Even now, Stan’s trying not to hurt him, even though he’s clearly keeping down anger at Kyle’s explosion, and that’s the difference between them that hurts the most right now. Somewhere in the part of his mind that’s not short-circuiting, Kyle doesn’t blame Stan for being angry. He deserves all of it.

All of it.

“Clean _yourself_ up, Kyle.”

Kyle panics anew as Stan sets the supplies he had in his hands down with barely suppressed force and pushes past him to get to the living room. A grab of his keys from the ring at the front, and Stan slips his skinny wallet into the oversized pocket of his sweats and grabs his riding jacket and gloves from the hook next to the hallway door. Kyle scurries behind Stan frantically like one of the rats, his hands starting to flutter around, face flushed and white at the same time with a new rushing emotion he can’t place as he tries unsuccessfully to get in between Stan and the door again only for Stan to maneuver past him without letting their chests touch.

“Stan, where are you going?”

The words come out almost nervous, scared even, like a child who misses its mother. Kyle’s knees are weakening, he can barely stand, he’s grabbing the foyer table for support as he watches Stan run his left hand through his hair and grip it, then look up at the slightly moldy ceiling above the door with an inscrutable expression. His silver silicone ring glints for a moment on his second finger. Kyle remembers kissing it secretly when it came in the mail, and then wonders if Stan takes it off when he leaves the house.

“I’m going out”--Kyle hears an unspoken _to the bar_ and his heart flops painfully inside his already-fluttering chest-- ”it’s been a long day, and I didn’t come home just to get yelled at as soon as I walk in the door. You can’t say something like that to me and expect me to want to be around you.”

Oh, fuck, fuck, ** _fuck_** , _no, no, no,_ he has to fix this _**right now, Stan can’t leave like this.**_

“Stan, no, I’m sorry, please, I--”

Stan holds up his hand to stop Kyle’s admittedly pathetic attempt to get him back. Kyle chokes, his voice dying in his throat as Stan lets his hand fall, clenches it into yet another fist. Kyle recognizes this as a tell of quiet fury and remembers the last time he’d seen those hands angry at him--exactly how it felt to get into a fistfight with Stan at age 15, when the “I love you”s they’d uttered as boys no longer seemed like anything but empty platitudes from children long-dead. The shiner he’d nursed for two weeks afterward healed faster than the salted barb of Stan’s disappointment, the _fuck you_ s and the _how could you do this to me_ s embedded somewhere fleshy and profound in his brain. Maybe he’d feel better if Stan threw a fist at him right now and broke his nose; that, he could understand and even love. But Stan never acts how Kyle wants now that they’re supposedly older, especially in situations like this. He just sighs deeply and looks at the floor as if searching for answers to some as yet unasked question. Somehow, this is worse to Kyle than the taste of fresh blood in his mouth.

Stan’s looking past him at the white wall behind the television as he speaks what seems like an eternity later; the words are detached, almost unreal in the air with their anger, but they’re forceful enough to crumple Kyle’s lungs within seconds. “No, Kyle. You’re not sorry. Don’t you dare fucking pull that shit with me. You just wanted to take out your anger on someone who would let you do it. But guess what, Kyle? Let me make this clear: I don’t do what I do on my own time just to irritate you, whatever you may want to believe, and I damn fucking sure don’t need another _motivational speech_ from the same person who blamed me for wanting to kill myself in the fourth grade. You want to be alone? Fine. I actually listen to what other people have to say, unlike you. Fuck you, dude. ** _Fuck you_** for even bringing that memory back up when you know very goddamn well I’ve tried hard to forget it. Oh, and before you try twenty minutes from now when you’re supposedly feeling 'really bad about what you said'”-- this is said in a nasal fourth-grade mockery of Kyle’s own voice-- “don’t even think about calling me.”

Stan leaves then without even a last look behind him, the door slamming unceremoniously behind him hard enough to make the frame rattle, and Kyle barely makes it to the carpeted living room floor before crumpling to his knees. He feels naked as he curls up there, toes clenching in his slippers, one elbow finding room on the coffee table; the wound on his neck has finally sealed, but it opens up for the third time when he grabs his neck groping for something physical on which to take out his rage.

What had he _done_?

Why had he said those things, to _Stan_ of all people?

Fuck. He was such a piece of shit.

Stan had been trying to help him, and now he was probably going to get killed riding drunk on his bike when he finally came home at God knows when in the morning, all because of Kyle. The idea of standing in the morgue looking at Stan’s lifeless face, knowing that the last thing he did was twist the dagger permanently embedded inside his husband and best friend’s baby-tender heart, makes Kyle wish he was dead. A slender bit of his rational mind is trying to tell him through the cotton of his pain that Stan isn’t going to be gone for long, _calm down, get your act together, he only drinks on Passover and Shabbat with you and at church when he goes, for fuck’s sake, sit up, breathe, breathe, breathe, in, out, in, out, come on!_

He tries to listen-- but Stan never said he was coming back.

Kyle doesn’t know how long he spends sitting there waiting for the adrenaline to leave his body, for the tears to finish running down his face, but eventually he raises his head from its awkward position in his knees. Just a few feet away, the rats are exactly where he pictured them: on the side table next to the twenty inch television, rustling around in their wood shaving bed, squeaking, nudging their noses around every corner trying to figure out their new home.

His eyes are swollen from all the crying, but Kyle can see one of them looking at him with what he assumes is interest. It’s brindled grey with a black spot between its front legs, and pushes itself against the side of the cage to get its head closer to him. After a few strong shoves, the oddly persistent rat has managed to get relatively close to the edge; Kyle recognizes faintly that should it keep moving, it might cause the cage to fall with all its accoutrements. No way in hell is he cleaning up rat piss at 7pm, much less without anyone to help him, so Kyle gets to his feet as fast as he can, shuffles to the table, and nudges the enterprising animals back into a safer position carefully as to avoid touching them.

After he manages to get them to stop squeaking, a task which frustrates him immensely, Kyle feels the weight of the world back around his shoulders and Stan’s hands around his throat. He doesn’t feel like doing anything now but escaping from the knife in his belly, so he does the only thing he has strength left to do: crawl onto the threadbare black couch and curl up into himself with only his robe as protection.

Kyle looks at the rats across the room and thinks of himself in their cage. Their beady eyes look at him accusingly, and then their pudgy bodies seem to shake in laughter at the tall man all balled up like a little baby just because he didn’t get his way. He thinks he sees their little mouths moving in whispers between their squeaks, mocking him to one another: they taunt him in Cartman’s voice from the night before his and Stan’s wedding.

_Are you gonna throw another tantrum, Kyle, fucking destroy the one person who likes you from the inside out day by day just because you’re a self-centered, hypocritical piece of shit who can’t resist his sweet ass? You might think he brings out the best in you, but over time, your true colors will show. We both know you're angry and bitter and selfish at heart, and you're gonna drag Stan down with you. He's gonna become just like you; miserable and cold. You're obsessed with fixing everyone, but in a few years time, Kyle, you'll finally break someone. You're gonna ruin the person you care about most, and you'll have to live with that forever._

Kyle clutches himself tighter to shut out the millions of voices in his head, but it doesn’t prevent the husband-shaped hole in his arms from slowly sucking him into an agonizing sleep filled with bile and the fat boy’s high school laughter. He shivers. It’s cold without Stan holding him. So very, very cold.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s still freezing when Kyle wakes up to lights flashing close to his eyes. Opening his eyes a sliver lets him know it’s the ten o’clock news anchors mouthing something vapid on new evidence of climate change. He faintly thinks about getting up to get in his real bed, only to freeze when the bulkiness of a pillow beneath his neck and the fluffy cotton sensation of a blanket finally registers in his mind. The old recliner to his right creaks back into its upright position. Fear immediately rises in Kyle’s belly, so he pretends to be asleep again in hopes that whatever person has come into his house will take him out mercifully. However, the steps don’t come towards him; instead, they walk away, towards the other side of the house, and he breathes a jittery sigh of relief. It was just Stan, getting up to go to the bathroom.

Oh, God. It was _Stan_.

The rats start squeaking again in the background-- could they sense he was awake? They didn’t matter. Stan was coming back now. What was Kyle going to do? Waking up just to be disemboweled by his now probably ex-husband was worse than just playing possum, but Stan knew the way Kyle breathed when he was truly asleep. There’s no way he could get away with it long enough for Stan to fall asleep himself. Kyle curls up into another ball, feeling helpless even though he knows, deep down, that he wasn’t the victim in this whole situation. He’d been the one to go for Stan’s throat completely unprovoked; sure, Stan had dragged shit up from years ago, but he would never have acted like that if Kyle hadn’t done the same thing (and worse, ripped him a new one for something that wasn’t even his fault).

Kyle remembers the fear in Stan’s eyes as if through a foggy camera lens, and wonders if Stan thought Kyle was going to hit him. He puts himself in Stan’s body, looking up at the feral face of the only man he loved and seeing an alcoholic father drunkenly towering over him, a voice and reddened eyes filled with rage that might as well have been saying _boy, you’re going to get it now, who do you think you are, talking to me that way, you little piece of shit! I give everything for you and all you are in return is a waste of space. Get out of my sight-- leave and don’t come back until I talk to your mother._

The horror of the thought that Stan might have almost _cowered before him_ immediately rockets Kyle upright and onto his feet. He stumbles into the coffee table trying to get up, and he can’t hurry fast enough towards the bathroom. He wants to see Stan _now_ , damn his own cowardice and selfish fear; he has to fall on his knees and promise Stan he would never, ever, ever hurt him. There cannot be fear in this house, because that is the one thing that would make Stan leave him for good and never look back. The ragged breath in his lungs reminds him that he needs Stan like air. Stan is his sun, his moon, second only to God (or perhaps himself) in the center of his universe, and Kyle’s world is dissolving just thinking about his best friend leaving his ring on the counter and kissing some other man in a dark corner of one of Denver’s only alcohol-free gay bars.

Perhaps it’s for his benefit that he all but crashes into Stan in the hallway trying to get to the bathroom. His husband is barely shorter than him, but that doesn’t stop the knock of their chests from stunning him even a little less. Kyle finds himself dazed, and takes a moment to find his still-wobbly feet against the wall. Oddly, Stan seems rather unfazed by the collision, and steps back slightly, just enough to where Kyle can’t reach him. He stands there almost imposingly, legs apart in a warrior’s stance, arms crossed lightly over his bare chest. The pine smell of his body soap faintly washes over Kyle from a distance. In the half-light, Stan almost glows, a saint-angel from one of his own terribly campy Catholic movies save the ratted sweatpants and pair of Adidas slides over fresh sock feet.

Meekly, Kyle barely raises his voice above an uncharacteristic whisper when he finally scrounges together the scarce willpower he has left to speak. All the thrilled resolve he’d had just moments before had vanished as quickly as he’d tried to take advantage of it. While trying to find his words, he realizes that he doesn’t exactly know how to address Stan after what happened earlier, so he begins with a hopefully neutral question:

“Stan, what time is it?”

He hopes this will force Stan to talk to him again in some way that resembles normality.

Luckily, it works. A terse but louder response comes back from the shadow a few moments later; Stan must have looked at the clock on the bathroom wall.

“It’s ten thirty. You’ve been out for over two hours.”

This statement is accompanied by Stan leaning against the wall; although his expression is still barely visible, the half of his face that Kyle can make out looks both stubborn and softened in concern. It’s an expression he’s unused to (a strange state of being for once-and-still-SBFs), and Kyle’s stomach churns uncomfortably thinking of what might further go wrong if he says something else risky. He looks at the floor in hopes that Stan will say something resembling an olive branch for him to grip onto, but then remembers that it used to be _Stan_ who usually started anything controversial between them.

“Kyle.”

After a few minutes of standing there in what he realizes was complete and utter silence, Kyle is surprised to hear his name spoken with an emotion that’s not anger. Now that he’s not spacing out anymore, he can feel Stan’s eyes on the top of his head. There’s a palpable tension in that gaze that wasn’t there before he left. Kyle breathes in, and he can feel a big chunk of coagulated dread catch somewhere unreachable in his lungs. He’s hesitant to even look up.

“Move, dude,” Stan says after another couple seconds of waiting. Kyle lifts his head slightly, only to see that his arms are still crossed.

“Why?”

Stan rolls his eyes-- a rather childish move, Kyle thinks-- and gestures with his right hand to the space behind Kyle’s back before letting his hands fall to his sides. It takes a moment for Kyle to realize that Stan wanted to go back into the main area to watch the news alone. God, he feels like an idiot. Everything wrong with this situation is all his doing.

“Oh,” Kyle says lamely, as if it makes up for his entire enormous gaffe, and scoots over to the side of the hallway that Stan isn’t on. Stan almost gets all the way past the fake column in the entryway before abruptly pausing. Kyle thinks he begins to look back, but instead Stan puts one hand on the wall beside him and stares down at the floor, as if some sort of scientific observation he’d made of Kyle had finally registered.

“Why didn’t you clean up your neck?”

Like almost everything else in this raw moment, this quiet question startles Kyle. Overthinking the tone of voice Stan was using might lead to Kyle thinking he was still worried, and immensely so, but that was ludicrous. Stan was probably mad at him for not being able to do even the simplest things he was asked. Kyle generates the only response he can that might appease Stan long enough for him to begin covering up his mistakes.

“I don’t know. I just. . . couldn’t. I can’t look at it.”

He could hear Stan sigh again, although it was quiet. “Go clean it up and come back in the living room. The stuff is still on the counter.” Then, after a brief pause-- “Along with some underwear.”

Kyle’s cheeks flamed in the dark. He wondered when Stan had the time to notice he wasn’t wearing underwear, although it’s not like that was a state the other man had never seen him in before. This embarrassment at being seen for the mess he is stays with him as he shakily goes to the bathroom and swipes at his neck; the clot breaks loose for the fourth time. It’s angry and red, but the new CVS sterile bandages on the counter sop it up into a white square that winks back at him from his neck. He washes his face too, in an effort to answer Stan’s call for normality. The rats flash across his mind, suggesting things in their sweet little girl voices, Gerald’s voice, Ike’s-- _Maybe he could stop Stan from being angry again, wouldn’t that be nice? His mother had always yelled at him when he’d said things like that--_

No, stop it, Kyle, that was years ago. Just fucking **move on** already and focus. This is your chance.

_Asshole. Douchebag. Fuckup. Piece of shit._

After Kyle stomps the voices back down and finishes cleaning up the dried blood, he puts away the kit and moves back into the living area. The news is still on, but there’s a smell of food from the tiny kitchen. Stan must have been making food for himself. Kyle folds himself back onto the couch like a cicada and mindlessly watches television, picking at the skin of his knuckle until there’s a welt there, angry and red. In the distance, the microwave beeps. Blood rushes in his ears. He thinks about Stan eating, Stan washing the dishes, then packing a bag and telling him he’ll be back in a few days.

Stan never coming back.

His lip starts to hurt. Kyle wonders when he’d started biting down, and lets go of it with his teeth.

His fears are only numbed when Stan comes back in the room a few minutes later. A plate of chicken salad is in his right hand, a wooden bowl and spoon in his left. Kyle recognizes the smell as the soup he’d meant to make before he got in the shower, the bowl and spoon as his favorites, and feels guilty for leaving yet another important thing undone. Silently, Stan sets everything down in front of him and digs paper napkins out of the side pocket of his sweats. They rest rumpled on the table, even after Stan tries to smooth them for some nervous reason Kyle can’t fathom.

Stan sits down and starts eating then. He doesn’t talk. Kyle doesn’t feel like starting a conversation, so he returns the silence in kind, figuring that Stan will say what he feels if it’s really all that important. His hand brushes the blue folder on the table. Kyle wonders if he’d read it-- the red paperwork inside wasn’t sticking out anymore. The business card for the Home Depot was laying beside it too. Another point for the knight in shining armor, or hardware store apron and goggles, for having his shit together when Kyle didn’t.

It feels like forever when Stan finally does talk, even though it’s only been five minutes since he sat down. Kyle braces for a scream or a cry.

“Mom called on the way home.”

“What did you tell her?” Kyle knows he means Sharon, and exhales a little. His own mother would never let Stan call her that-- at least not now.

“That you said hi. That everything was fine.”

Was it?

God. He’d turned Stan into a liar.

“Where did you go?” Kyle changes the subject, hoping it wasn’t the answer he feared. Stan coughs lightly, then takes another languid bite of his leftover chicken berry salad. Some vinegar’s still on his lip, even after he swallows and licks his lips absently; Kyle thinks about kissing it away just to feel the sting of the acid on his own chapped mouth.

“I went outside and sat on my bike. Went for a ride down the farm road. Came back.”

Kyle suppresses his urge to respond sardonically and settles for an appropriately neutral sentence instead. “Oh. Well, I’m glad you were safe.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Kyle doesn’t answer, just takes another bite of his soup while mulling over the image of Stan the first day he’d had the bike. Stan had gotten it the last year he was in college, proudly showing Kyle the license and cheap safety gear he’d gotten from Uncle Jimbo the last day of Thanksgiving break--when Kyle pretended he hadn’t cut his father out of his life and actually showed up to eat holiday leftovers and talk vapidly about how nice it was that Ike had picked a charter school for his secondary education.

They’d fought then too. Kyle faintly remembers over the haze of alcohol he’d been drinking that day throwing the new helmet on the ground and asking Stan if he wanted to get himself killed on the highway. Stan had snarled over a tear “Why not? You don’t give a shit if I live or die anyway, you self-centered asshole, so why are you upset someone might finish the job?” They’d both fallen silent then, but the sting of Stan’s impulsive words still hung in the air until the two of them made out in the back of Kyle’s car (only after he was sober enough to cry out an apology to Stan, who smoothed his disheveled curls back as he sobbed, just like the father Kyle’d never had). Kyle went to anger management counseling for the third time the next day, and remembered his therapist giving him the exact same speech on trusting others he’d given Stan at age 13. He wishes he’d listened to himself then, too.

In the real world Stan starts to gobble his food, taking two ravenous bites after a few more moments of silently being next to Kyle. The TV blares, providing a filling backdrop that makes the isolation between them a bit more palatable. Yet, somehow, Kyle can’t seem to eat more than half the soup Stan made (and specifically for him, at that)-- it gets cold in his mouth as soon as he drinks it, so he puts his bowl on the coffee table and tries to keep the few bites he ate of it from coming back into his throat. Stan’s gaze flicks to the side to make note of Kyle’s poor appetite, but he doesn’t say anything, instead paying rapt attention to the episode of 60 Minutes that had just turned on about exposing some former PETA executive.

It takes Stan ten more minutes to finish the sunflower seeds at the bottom of his plate; in the same ten minutes, Kyle has crossed and uncrossed his bare legs at least four times, turning over options for his eight thousand and first apology to Stan. He discards groveling within seconds, followed closely by renting a hotel room to give Stan the house to himself for the evening. Verbal apologies at this time of night were probably a no; there’s been enough talking for one night, and he doesn’t want to set himself off again and ruin what little progress he’s made in getting back into his husband’s good graces. He can’t remember if Stan has work in the morning, but he surely hopes Stan doesn’t; maybe breakfast in bed might be a good option, along with whatever cute animal apology card he could get from the Dollar Tree.

Kyle discards his well-conceived plan for an appropriately sentimental fruit arrangement at Stan’s assumption of a relaxed posture on the couch in between the Shirley Temple box set commercial and an advertisement for _Judge Judy_. Impulsively, he slides over from his place a cushion away on the loveseat and half-pulls himself onto Stan’s lap, one leg trailing its toes on the floor. It’s something they’ve done for years, ever since Kyle was a hopelessly pining gay teenager trying to squeeze every ounce of satisfaction he could from the touch of his definitely asexual best friend. The spot is comfortable, as always, Stan’s thighs tensing beneath the half of Kyle’s lower body that’s there, the scent of his sweat and soap and musk providing a usually ready panacea to all Kyle’s worries. But this time Stan doesn’t bend and plop his head on Kyle’s shoulder, or pull Kyle all the way into his lap to soothe the ache in Kyle’s belly. Instead, Kyle’s just there, with one of Stan’s iron-corded arms to hold his songbird’s body on its precarious perch. It’s a silent difference in body language that makes Kyle’s heart begin its hopeless, helpless palpitation anew; he’d failed, once again, to reconnect the frayed ends between them.

They sit there in silence for God knows how long, Stan’s arm seemingly unstrained, remainder of Kyle’s leftover soup going cold on the coffee table. From the corner of his eye that’s not nearly pressed into Stan’s bare shoulder, Kyle can see the rats moving in their cage. From all the times he’s looked at them in the span of the whole evening, he never noticed one of them-- the same black-speckled one who’d wanted to get close to him-- has Stan’s bluish-brown eyes. They’re the same steady and inquisitive gaze Kyle’s felt in his mind since childhood, but in another second the eyes of the rodent feel as if they’re radiating some hostile, silent judgment against him for not being good enough for the man who’d “pulled himself up by the bootstraps” (that was Uncle Jimbo’s term for it every one of the three times Stan had done rehab, at least). Kyle tries to ignore it, but can’t, even with the normal comfort of his chest pushing against Stan’s in practiced, synchronized breaths.

It’s like this for another moment longer, until Kyle feels Stan shift his hand under his knee and deposit him fully back onto the couch. The absence of Stan’s warmth beneath him feels like a rejection. Kyle immediately plants his right hand onto the couch beside him to aid in his positioning back where he belonged-- as if, through asserting himself, he could convince his generally touch-averse husband that Kyle was worthy of being allowed into his personal space-- but stills that same hand when he feels it being covered by one of Stan’s. He watches and feels as Stan takes Kyle’s hand into one of his own now-rough palms, rubs the writing callus on Kyle’s middle finger with a gentle thumb, then traces a dark pear- shaped mole the size of a dime on the back of his hand that Kyle himself had always hated since childhood. In a muggy memory, Kyle remembers a much younger acne-studded Stan prodding it, talking over half a mouthful of Shakey’s pizza-- _I’ve always liked it, dude. It’s unique. Anyway, you aren’t eating pepperoni anymore, right?_

A cloying bittersweetness hangs in the air, one that doesn’t disperse when Stan makes his way to the metal band on Kyle’s middle finger. It’s simple and gold, the one sunken baguette diamond in it feebly sparkling in the lamplight against the ghostly pale of freckled skin. Kyle feels Stan twist the metal gently left, then right, worrying it as if it was his own metal ring (which sits in a drawer, somewhere, waiting for a special occasion that Kyle’s always doubted will ever come again). However, Kyle makes the mistake of looking up from his hopeful reverie to see a heavy-faced Stan almost too small against the couch, his body hunched over from its trained straighter posture. The motion of Stan’s fingers on his hand now seems like the wringing of a cloth, one trying to squeeze every last drop of Stan’s affection for Kyle into something he could draw on in order to fix things. His gaze seems parched, bloated, and dry, almost unfeeling as he stares at the symbol of their bond they’d spent months picking out, and Kyle wonders if Stan will say the fateful words they use in movies when it’s all over.

There’s a lingering feeling in Kyle’s throat that he’d murdered someone tonight, hope’s corpse there staring at him from the rat’s eyes now looking at him through Stan’s skull. In Kyle’s head the rat says in Stan’s voice, you’ve got to clean up your mess. Hurry up, hurry up, you asshole, fix your shit so I don’t have to! Fix this now! _ **Now! Fix me!**_

The words vomit up without warning from Kyle’s gut. Like almost every other words he’s said that night, they don’t belong to him; neither does the unsteady other hand he puts on top of Stan’s. He wants to squeeze, but it feels like his leaden limbs won’t do anything but lay there. Frantically, he wills his fingers to curl around Stan, hold him so he won’t get up and leave Kyle sitting there to be eaten by the eyes of the rats.

“I’m ruining you, aren’t I?”

In response, Stan grips Kyle’s right hand defiantly, like a lifeline. It’s warm. The silicone band he’s still wearing looks like a flat grey, blending in with the cool undertone of Stan’s olive hand.

Hollowly, after a small second, Stan speaks. There’s a spark of life in his eyes again, the same one from the awkward confrontation earlier, but it’s small and dim. He looks down at his lap with a mixed expression, one of anger and sorrow and something big Kyle can’t precisely place.

“No, Kyle. It’s not your fault I can’t give you the life you deserve.”

At Stan’s self-deprecation Kyle turns, suddenly energized from his haphazard slouch, and glares feebly at the crown of Stan’s head. His brow furrows in a disgusted, deep line, knees knocking against his husband’s.

“How could you _say that_ , Stan? You’re the only thing I want.” He reaches up for Stan’s cheek, trying to pull Stan’s face toward him and hold it gently enough that maybe Stan will let him in again, but Kyle’s fingers meet air when Stan abruptly lets go of his hand and stands up. He looks down at Kyle for a few moments with the same emotion he’d had before he left, with a little more fear this time, and skitters back to the chair he’d claimed as his territory earlier after turning off the television. This is the sudden change, the anger Kyle has been waiting for, the hell he doesn’t want to believe in but knows exists somewhere deep in Stan’s mind waiting to be unleashed on him. Stan sits in the recliner, laces his hands together, and plants his elbows firmly on his knees like a stubborn child. He remolds his hands into two fists, and then puts his head on them. Kyle’s disturbed to notice Stan’s strong body quickly crumble into a mess of shaking-- no, this wasn’t how Stan acted when he was angry. His earlier suspicions had been correct: under all the knightly bravado he’d been putting on for the longest time, Stan was _afraid_. Now the fallout he’s been living under--and had tried to dissipate with the lifeline of a cobbled-together meal--is crashing down onto both of them with the alarming speed only trauma can reach.

“Don’t touch me like that right now, Kyle. Don’t. Every fucking time I’ve seen your face over the past two hours, it’s reminded me of him. I don’t want you to look at me like that.”

“Like _how_ , Stan?”

“Like he did! Like you hate me deep down inside but you’re saying things I want you to say just to make me feel better before you leave!” There’s a beginning of tears in Stan’s voice, just the same as when Kyle had lost his mind in front of the vanity. Fuck. Shit. Fuck, again, fifty times over. He’d set Stan off, and at 1am, nonetheless. _Shit, shit, shit._

Instead of doing nothing, Kyle decides to take action. He has to make this right, even though he barely feels strong enough to look at Stan without shedding exhausted tears himself over the mistakes he’s made that night. He can scarcely put words together, and he doesn’t really want to speak at all for fear of running roughshod over yet another of Stan’s repressed childhood memories, but what he can form in his mouth sounds relatively plausible when posed to the husband in his mind.

“No, Stan. Don’t blame yourself for my temper. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.”

“Kyle, you don’t get it--”

“What don’t I get? I was an asshole, I need to apologize, and I need to fix this.”

“Kyle, goddamn, shut the **_fuck_** up and listen to me!” Stan hoarsely snaps. His wet eyes glisten and bore into Kyle’s forehead like the rat’s; right now, Kyle can’t really tell the difference between nightmares and the havoc he’s wreaked. It’s probably also because his double dose of dry-swallowed expired Xanax has fully worn off-- not that it did any good. He’d have to go to the psychiatrist again, someday, in a future when Stan had finished saying what he had to say.

Kyle pushes himself back onto Earth, finally having regained some semblance of reason from shock. He closes his mouth so as not to look like a carp when Stan sneaks a glance at him. His husband pauses, then breathes out shakily.

“Why did you have to bring _that_ up, Kyle?”

“I’m just stressed. I didn’t mean any of it. I promise.”

“I was trying to help you, Kyle! Stop evading my goddamn questions and just fucking tell me, why did you bring it up!” The yell Stan gives out is weak, but it still hurts if only for the fact that he’s crying now, big, fat tears that roll over the taped electrical burns on his arms. Kyle’s trying to remember how to put on the mask of the Kyle Stan needs in this moment, the one who knows how to use the right words he learned from talking to Stan’s counselor ten years ago over the phone (two days after the incident, he remembers shortly after). But he can’t; he thinks that part of him’s in a grave somewhere, another part of his unwitting murder that evening.

Instead, Kyle tries the part his therapist taught him, the one about honesty, because Stan was always honest with him-- at least when he wanted to be. Maybe it would work, somehow, although he remembers he should have begun with the truth two minutes ago. He looks Stan as straight in the eye as he can. The rats have started to squeak; they’re laughing at him again for being such a fool, for thinking Stan can even begin to understand what he’s going through.

“Because I was angry at myself, and I had to use something I knew would hurt you so I could be angry at you instead for something you didn’t do.”

Stan just stares at him, but he doesn’t meet Kyle’s eyes. Then he sighs, a big breath that washes out his figure into something less sharp, more relaxed from apathy.

“You’re a selfish asshole, Kyle.”

The rats make noise again; this time, they sound happier. Kyle’s not a superstitious man, but he trusts that if even the beasts from his nightmares will give him reprieve, they must be doing something right. For this reason alone Kyle accepts the rock Stan’s words heave onto his chest, sucking a breath in through his mouth, knowing it’ll only be there until morning when their fight’s finally over. He deserves the insult, because when Stan bothered to say mean things about him, they were usually true.

“I know, Stan.”

Stan scoffs in disbelief. “Do you, Kyle?”

“No. I guess I don’t.”

Stan straightens up one last time, gives his hands a run over his face, then swipes his eyes. He looks at the ground, the rage gone--or at least subsumed under a thin veil of simple frustration. “That’s the one correct thing you’ve said all night.”

The overall lack of anything but exhaustion in Stan’s tone means that Stan’s had enough of talk, or at least Kyle thinks so, and maybe now this thing that’s happened between them is actually all over. It’s for this reason that he makes an effort to finally ask, “Stan?”

“What, Kyle?”

“It’s really late, and we’re not going to get anywhere discussing any of this--” Kyle waves his hand between them in a feeble attempt to clear the air-- “right now. How about we just go to bed separately and talk in the morning?”

“No. I want you to apologize now. Really apologize, not the half-assed excuse you gave me.”

“Stan--”

“God, Kyle, just, please, _apologize._ I don’t want to fight anymore.”

There it was. The real end, Kyle hopes, because it was the one Stan wanted.

“I’m sorry, Stan. For getting mad at you about things that weren’t your fault, for not telling you why I was stressed, and for bringing up him. That wasn’t right of me. I wish I could take it all back.”

Stan fixes him with one last gaze, the one he’d been waiting for all along. It’s brimming with the child he was at age 12.

“I don’t believe you right now, Kyle. I don’t want to believe you. I want to walk out of this house just like he did when I was eighteen. But I’m not going to, because I’m not like him, and I know you’re not either.”

Kyle rearranges his face from the thirty year old he was into the same twelve year old memory Stan had of him. He hopes it’s comforting, or at least good enough to get Stan over the hump. It’s his excuse, a replacement for the fact that he doesn’t know how to end the fight without starting it again.

“No. You’re not.” Stan breathes deeply, in and out, twice, three, four, five times, like all the good kids who actually paid attention in therapy. It’s mesmerizing to watch Stan self-soothe, a skill Kyle had never really mastered in any meaningful way.

”I’m done with this. Aren’t you?” Stan stands up, blows out another breath, and stretches; Kyle lets his guard down, just a little, at the relaxed pull of Stan’s belly under the waistband of his sweatpants. The recliner creaks.

“Yeah.” Kyle answers dumbly, despite himself, chastised by Stan’s superior restraint.

“Let’s go to bed. We can talk in the morning.”

“Yeah.” He wants to ask, _since when is Stan the one with his shit together?_

But he doesn’t.  
  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s an awkward end for the awkward two of them. Kyle gets to his feet perhaps too quickly; his knees crackle in protest. Stan might have laughed at that, he thinks, if they were their true selves then. They pick up the dishes from the table silently and put them away, like they’d been taught from birth, Kyle batting Stan aside to let him at the narrow entrance first. He takes the opportunity to play with the water in the sink for a moment like a bored cat, just to let the sensation ground him more; he’s strategically flicking droplets at a stain before Stan finishes putting the leftover soup into an ancient container and shunts him over. Kyle pouts when Stan makes him wash his bowl--the sensation of the tap-stream slowly running over him had always reminded him too much of teeth--but their shoulders next to one another provides a pleasant backdrop that dissipates his jumpiness ever so slightly.

When their cleanup is almost over, he can sense Stan humming beside him nervously, like he was about to propose again and fumble over his words. His expression is just neutral, though, so it’s nothing that serious. Then again, he hadn’t been able to predict Stan’s actions all night, so who knew?

They both dry their hands on the same raggedy dishtowel, somehow, and Kyle feels Stan’s fingers brush against his over a layer of cloth. They clash again, and Kyle feels Stan looking for his hand clearly this time, the nervous vibration from earlier accompanying it. The gesture is simple, but meaningful in an instant, the boyhood symbol of reconciliation they’d worked out when Stan was in his nonverbal phase; Kyle instantly works his fingers into Stan’s once their palms meet, but lets Stan lead him to their bedroom instead of the other way around from their wedding night. They’re not even out of the kitchen when his heart starts beating earnestly; the forgiveness in his husband’s gentle, squeezing fingers warms him all the way up to the fluttering pulse meaningless and hollow without it. Kyle wants to cry like his fourth-grade self, ridiculously and openly, and it’s all he can do to try to keep the flood down when Stan pauses their walk briefly to shut off the television and doesn’t let go.

Their healing to peaceful coexistence is almost complete when Kyle stops at the threshold of their shared room, jerking Stan’s hand ever so gently just as Stan’s about to let go and put on his sleeping shirt. He can hear the rats squeaking again, shrilly, and curses in the back of his mind; they must have wanted more attention. The latent aggression always in the idea of losing Stan to something else competing for his love contemplates the idea of putting them outside, but Kyle’s conscience says otherwise. He knows they need to present a unified front against the force of himself trying to destroy them-- so he speaks up.

“One more thing, Stan.”

“What? I wanna go to bed.” A little high-school hockey player whine comes out of Stan’s mouth to punctuate the sentence. Kyle notices the scrunch of his face as he yawns and rubs his eyes with his other hand like a baby, and tucks it away in the soft part of his heart for safekeeping. He almost hates to abduct Stan from the warm bed they both sorely needed at this point, but Kyle has to be the responsible adult at some point this evening.

“Don’t you have to do. . . something with the rats?” He says it awkwardly, but kindly, like Stan would want him to-- as if Kyle’s feeling a sort of camaraderie with the damn things for torturing him all night.

Once he perceives Kyle’s words--it takes a moment--Stan’s face crumples from its sleepy veneer into a new alertness, as if he’s committed some sort of grave mistake. “Shit. Yeah, I need to change their water. Go ahead and sleep.”

Stan lets go of his hand and goes back into the living room; Kyle’s not sure if it’s a sleep-deprived desire for self-flagellation or guilty helpfulness that makes him follow instead of crawling underneath his threadbare quilt (he’d much rather do that than face his fears; he’s had enough of that for one night). He flicks the light in the foyer back on to see Stan gently moving the cage all around, as if he can’t find the way it was assembled. The floorboard creaks under Kyle’s foot; Stan looks up, startled, irritated eyes half-closed from dumbly squinting in the dark. He mumbles to no one, “I can’t find the damn latch.”

“Didn’t you build that cage?”

“No.” Then-- “I can’t see.”

“ _Light_ helps when you’re working, Stan.”

Finally realizing Kyle’s presence in a meaningful way, Stan makes a noise in his throat; the shut up, dude is implied with the bob of his Adam’s apple. It’s so deliciously mundane that it makes Kyle lust, even in the aftermath of his adrenaline rush. Kyle watches his husband work for a few moments at a distance, pathetically fascinated by the delicacy of Stan’s large hands on the metal, imagining it as his own body, Stan splitting him open and handling his soul with calloused fingers.

His teenage boy disembodiment fantasy sustains him until Stan opens the cage and says, “Get over here, would you?”

“Okay.”

The sentiment behind the word is a lie, but it’s the first word he’s said all night that feels like his. Kyle in truth wants nowhere near the squirming creatures, especially now that the barrier keeping him from them was gone. But he decides he can stop being a jackass and actually contribute to Stan’s happiness for once after all they’d been through that night, even if it makes his skin crawl.

In his sock feet, he inches gradually towards the cage, hiding his disgust as well as he can until he’s a foot away from the end of the whole setup and out of Stan’s direct sight. He realizes the cage is way too small for the two squirming creatures-- their bodies can barely squeeze in between the two floors of the cage-- and connects this to their earlier desperate attempt to get off the side table. Kyle wonders if Stan rushed their care just to get home to him. Somehow, this makes him feel worse than he already does, just as the guilt wasn’t consuming him anymore. The rest of his euphoria from earlier disappears, and he’s back to where he started again. He looks up at the ceiling, feeling Stan moving around to his right.

“Kyle,” Stan asks meekly a few moments later, “could you please come hold her? Daisy will stay here on the table, but Maisie likes to run.” His eyes are still on the cage, and the other rat’s there on top of it, staring at Stan like it was going to leap onto his throat and dig its teeth in.

Christ, maybe he really _did_ need to get back on his anti-psychotic meds.

“Sure,” Kyle says, beside himself with jumpiness at this point, stooping and holding out his cupped hands for the rat like he’s back in the first grade getting a snack. He immediately regrets it when he feels the wriggling body deposited in his hands; the skittering of the animal’s nails against his sweaty palms brings back the nightmare-memories of Kenny’s corpse. To ground himself, he tries to remember the rat’s name, which is somehow important, probably because it was important to Stan. He gives up on remembering and asks, “What’s this one’s name again?” a few seconds later, because hearing only the buzz of the light and the rat squeaks is starting to make him antsy.

“Maisie,” Stan answers instantly, jiggling the fixed water bottle, his hands clearing away some cap to put in a funnel he’d acquired from somewhere when Kyle was looking up at the ceiling and trying not to crawl out of his skin. “It doesn’t matter though.”

“It matters to you.”

This notion of caring on Kyle’s part apparently seems to stun Stan, as he stops his work-- but only for a moment. Another expression finds its way onto his face, appallingly inscrutable. He looks at Kyle’s hands through the corner of his eye at Maisie, and Kyle gets the absurd notion that Stan’s trying to send the rat some comfort through his gaze. Something is wrong here.

“It doesn’t matter because they’re not staying.”

“Where are they going?”

Kyle tentatively looks down, surprisingly feeling slightly more comfortable with the rat now that she’s not just another figment of his imagination. He reasons she wouldn’t gnaw him if he gave her other stimulation, and strokes Maisie’s brindled head with a finger after he speaks. She squeaks and bunts her head against his finger. When he finally looks at her fully, Kyle realizes she’s the one with Stan’s eyes, the one who had been looking at him the most all night; this is frightening and endearing all at once. His husband doesn’t answer his question for a long time, hours maybe, long enough for Kyle not to mind holding Maisie anymore. There’s a force to Stan’s movements in the cage that brings back his attempts at boxing after school in the ninth grade; it’s angry, but somehow empty of anything other than passive rage against outside forces he was unable to stop. A cloud falls over the room, and it’s all that Kyle can do to watch Stan and keep the rat in his hands calm.

The words that come from Stan hit Kyle like they’d both been punched.

“They’re going to the vet to be euthanized on Monday. The shelter wanted them in a home for the last two days, and we were the only ones with room.”

All at once, Kyle’s mouth dries. He cups Maisie to his chest unconsciously, protective even though he can do nothing about her coming end. All Stan’s devotion towards the rats, his desperation for Kyle to let him take them in--it all made too much sense now.

“I’m sorry, Stan.”

It’s all he can think of to say over his rapidly filling throat; there’s no customer service grief counselor left in him, just the millstone of his body and the knowledge that Stan was about to lose something very important to him, or a part of himself altogether. His husband continues on fixing the cage without awareness that Kyle had even spoken, the voice coming out of him disembodied; somehow, Kyle can tell it’s his way of pretending none of this affects him, but the pulp of Stan’s heart is showing anyway from the tears Kyle’d already made in that particular carefully crafted facade.

“They’d been there too long. There was no home for them, and the shelter needed room.”

“If I had known--”

“You wouldn’t have done anything. I know you hate them.”

Kyle grinds his teeth, unable to deny the charge even to make Stan feel less culpable; Maisie squeaks, more quietly this time, as if she knows what’s coming. Kyle feels her little heartbeat against his finger, and grasps her in one hand to stroke her chest with the other, as if she could understand his stuntedly cerebral way of comforting. He feels ugly and filthy and self-centered as he looks at the top of her little head, the way she actually seemed to soak up the avarice in his heart and make it clean regret again. Just like Stan, she looked _just like Stan_ , her bright little gaze boring into him innocently, waiting to be praised and petted and loved and told she was beautiful. The images that flash through his mind-- Stan’s quietly agonized face as he would sign the paperwork to let her die, the needle going into Maisie’s neck and pushing until she went limp, Stan crying in the car before covering up his tears to attend to his spoiled brat of a husband on his day off-- are all too awful for Kyle to bear on his last shoestring of sanity. Before he realizes it, he’s tearing up; he can barely see the rat through the water in the corners of his eyes, and his voice comes out in another girlish sob that contrasts the normally stable depth of his baritone.

“I would have… learned to love these. For you.”

Stan looks over at Kyle-- in his face this time, not at Maisie-- and the unbridled grief and hatred there from the whole night’s events somehow unearthed from all the exhaustion arrests Kyle’s heart in his chest.

“When have you really ever done anything for **_me_** , Kyle?”

Kyle loses it then, at the knowledge that he was about to let part of Stan die, guilty, guilty, _guilty, murderer, murderer!_ Tears, big fat ones, the same as plagued Stan hours ago, roll down his face despite his knowledge that they will solve nothing; they get worse a minute later when Stan finishes filling the water bottle and moves to get Maisie from him. Kyle skitters backward all the way towards the recliner, almost stumbling over the coffee table, the rat clutched to his chest without any more regard to the fear; all he can see now is how awful he’s been to Stan for the longest time, and if keeping Maisie will fix the fuckup he is, he’ll let a thousand rats into his house just so his husband can feel at home. He curls up in the recliner, Maisie to his chest like she’s their child. Maybe she should be.

Stan walks over to the chair and stands at its arm, looking down at Kyle like a disappointed parent.

“Kyle, Jesus fuck, this isn’t the time for your theatrics.”

“I’m not letting her go to that vet’s office!”

“It’s too late, Kyle.”

At the realization that he’s already lost yet another war for Stan’s emotional wholeness, Kyle lets out a little roar and pitches himself at the cage in a last-ditch effort to protect the rats for Stan’s sake, not caring that he looks deranged. His chest is heaving, and he’s barely able to breathe, but he stands his ground when Stan approaches him again, at a slow cat’s stalk that makes him feel like a rat himself. Quickly Kyle’s former-A-student brain races to find something that will stop Maisie from dying, and Stan with her. There’s nothing; he improvises with a hand on top of the cage’s opening. He holds Maisie closer and blurts, “We’re keeping her until there’s space again.”

“What?” Stan pauses for a moment, clearly befuddled by Kyle’s change in tune. This outcome pleases Kyle, so he continues on with the hasty hare-brained plot he’s concocted.

“She’s staying until there’s space again. The other one, too. I’ve made my decision. Let’s go to sleep. We’ll buy whatever we need for them tomorrow.”

Stan moves forward another little bit, his face now just angry; now tears are collecting in his eyes too, though for what Kyle doesn’t know. He rolls his eyes; the childish motion makes Kyle panic again. “Stop pretending you give a shit, Kyle, it’s just making me feel worse.”

“I’m serious. They’re staying until there’s another home for them.”

Stan’s chest-to-chest with Kyle after another few seconds; Kyle tries to move away, but can’t without knocking the hapless Daisy and her living quarters off the table or hitting himself into the wall. He continues his game of keep-away by trying to hold Maisie aloft with one hand, but her size and the wriggle of her body makes this impossible after more than a few seconds. Stan glares at Kyle and reaches up, finally wrestling the brindled rat from his grasp with his goalie’s strength, and puts her back into the cage behind Kyle’s back (Kyle realizes too late he had moved his hand from the opening in the commotion).

Stan then backs and tries to turn, probably to go to bed alone and get away from the insanity that was his spouse, but Kyle scrambles into action for a final time and throws his arms around Stan’s bare torso. His face ends up in the cleft of Stan’s shoulder, staining it with the last vestiges of his tears; his grip in truth is likely weaker than a child’s, but he has to try one last time to convince Stan that he’s not the monster he now knows himself he already is-- has been for the past two months. Will be forever. 

“No, Stan. Don’t take them to the vet. I promise I’ll let you keep them as long as they need, and I won’t complain, not even a little. I’ve been really, really shitty to you for the past two months, my job and your job and the money, it’s just been weighing on me until things got bad again. Fuck, who am I kidding, it’s been bad for a long time, and I was to much of a dickhead to realize I was just living for myself and not for you, like I promised seven years ago. I need to make it up to you, all of it, so will you please, please just let them stay until there’s space for them again? I’ll call whoever the hell I need to on my lunch break.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Kyle. Let me go.”

Kyle’s helpless to stop Stan as he breaks Kyle’s limpid embrace and proceeds towards the foyer, not even looking back at Kyle to see if he’s following. He gets to the light switch before Kyle reaches into himself for the words-- Stan’s words-- he’s wanted to say all night but couldn’t until now, the grief at all of it finally pushing them out one last time.

“Things have changed, Stan. Can’t you see it?”

The response comes without pause, an inexact mirror of that snowy day. “No. But I wish I could.”

The light collapses around Kyle as Stan shuts the light off, and he stands there for a moment to watch Stan turn tail into the bedroom, his chest utterly empty of anything resembling life. He sits on the couch when he can’t find the strength to stand anymore and stares in the direction of the rats, not sleeping purposely just to hear them squeak one more time. It all seemed so stupid to him now, his constant thoughts about what Stan had been doing; it was just more proof that he was not, had never been good enough for his husband, who so bravely faced his problems each and every day while Kyle himself was fretting about whether or not Stan was spending too much time on a hobby. A _hobby_.

He himself had said to Stan years ago that insanity was best defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result; he wonders, head in hands, if his constant attempts to makes ends meet with Stan was just more proof of his decline. A sudden piercing migraine throbs through his skull, the sound of the rats moving around driving a jackhammer through his skull, and Kyle wonders if it’s too early to contribute to his own death by breaking out his lighter and the pack of Marlboros he kept hidden away in his briefcase.

But, in the end, he has not even the strength to get up and end the hamster wheel in his mind with a cigarette. He wakes up at noon the next day, but doesn’t remember sleeping, only the worry that maybe he’s never really known his husband at all. There’s a plate of food in front of him, the eggs and veggie bacon on it long gone cold, but the idea of eating turns his stomach when he’s awake enough to recall what was supposed to happen the next morning.

Kyle looks up.

The rats are still there.

Stan is gone.

A note on the rats' cage reads, _Meet me at Petsmart at 6. We’re going to talk._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading my work; this particular fic was inspired by a StanKyle scenario posted by the wonderful traitor-boyfriend (heelbruiser on ao3). Predictably, I made it far less amusing than the original idea suggested. 
> 
> Please consider leaving a comment so that I know what to improve in my next work and/or what you liked about the fic!


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